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6 An Unpre­ce­dented Election message-­testing (Golshan, 2016). The campaign also aired far fewer tele­ vi ­ sion advertisements: 76,068 compared to 198,689 from Clinton (Fowler, Ridout, & Franz, 2016). When combined with all expenditures from outside groups, the imbalance was 262,400 ads on behalf of Clinton’s campaign compared to 102,358 on behalf of Trump in the general election. This kind of ad imbalance is rare in presidential elections where campaigns often expend equal resources to offset the potential gains from their opponents (Sides & Vavreck, 2014). The Trump campaign’s unusual strategy prompted numerous headlines in the summer of 2016 such as “­There is no Trump campaign” (Graham, 2016), “Donald Trump does not have a campaign” (Sarlin, Tur, & Vitali, 2016), and “Trump ­doesn’t have a national campaign” (Gold, 2016). Trump’s candidacy was also unusual in its resilience. On numerous occa- sions, Trump would do or say something that sparked a controversy, causing pundits to won­der if he had terminally undermined his hopes of winning the presidency. To illustrate this point, Politico generated a list of 37 events that would have “ended the campaign of any other politician” (Kruse & Gee, 2016, para. 1). Their list included his infamous insinuation that Mexican immigrants ­ were rapists his implication that former Republican presidential nominee and sitting U.S. Senator John McCain was not a war hero ­ because he was a pris- oner of war (Trump preferred ­people who had not been captured) his appar- ent belief that Megyn Kelly, then a Fox News host and presidential debate moderator, asked him difficult questions ­ because she was menstruating his insulting imitation of Serge Kovaleski, a reporter for The New York Times who has a congenital condition that affects his joints his commitment to war crimes (torture and targeting civilian ­family members of terrorists) his argument that a federal judge could not be fair in a case about Trump University ­because of his ethnicity his public feud with parents of a U.S. soldier who was killed while serving in Iraq his Gerald Ford-­esque misunderstanding of Rus­sian aggression into Eastern Eu­rope his insinuation that somebody should assas- sinate Clinton should she be elected and his claim that Obama founded the terrorist organ­ization ISIS (Kruse & Gee, 2016). This noncomprehensive list of controversial statements and gaffes all occurred before an Access Hollywood tape recording surfaced in which Trump appeared to brag about committing sexual assault, a controversy that preceded 15 ­ women coming forward to accuse him of the very actions he described in the recording (Nelson & Crockett, 2017). As all of this illustrates, what­ever ­ else can be said of the 2016 presidential election, it was truly unpre­ce­dented. The first female nominee of a major po­liti­cal party was defeated by the first president to ever win election without serving in public office or the military. A hostile foreign government inter- vened to undermine the demo­cratic pro­cess and possibly influence the out- come. One candidate was ­under FBI investigation that became unusually public the other campaign is, at the time of this writing, ­ under another FBI investigation for pos­ si ­ ble involvement in Rus­sia’s intervention. The media fixated